On Christian Joy §2

Christian joy is God’s own joy, shared with us by the Spirit present in and among and for us.

God’s own “private life” is a life of joy, for God is Father, Son, and Spirit eternally and infinitely enjoying one another.

In the beginning is not the solitude of a One, of an eternal Being, alone and infinite. Rather, in the beginning is the communion of the three Unique Ones. Community is the deepest and most foundational reality that exists [1].

Without knowing this, we could never (meaningfully) confess that God is love, for love is love only when it is given and received. Also, if this were not true then we would (wrongly) conclude that creation was made to satisfy some need in God. But the truth is, God creates for the sake of the creation, as well as for God’s own sake, and God creates so that the creature might participate, might be caught up in, the inter-trinitarian mutuality and interdependence. It is as if the Father had said to the Son and Spirit: “We are having such a grand time; we really should make it so that others could enjoy this, too.”

“In the beginning – community.” God eternally delights in God. And God delights – also eternally! – in creation. As I said before, God creates not out of need but out of sheer grace, out of love for the creation, a love which precedes and makes possible the very existence of the creation as beloved!

The Three celebrate creation as “very good.” Created reality – everything from nebulae to nectarines, from angels to amoebae – is to God “eden,” that is a place of delights.  Scripture speaks to us of a God who is a God of delights, a God who enjoys being. (In fact, we could say that God’s enjoyment of being is what makes being be!) In love, this God makes it possible for His human creatures to enjoy these delights, so that that being human is in a very real sense the capacity to enjoy life as God’s gift.

This may seem hopelessly abstract, but actually it is absolutely concrete. We exist because God exists and holds us up in existence – “in him all things hold together,” as St Paul says. This is the same as saying we enjoy because God enjoys. Our joy is really God’s joy shared with us by the Holy Spirit.

This is true for all persons, regardless of whether or not they believe. Any human joy – so long as it is enjoyment of the good – is a sharing in God’s joy. (Of course, much human enjoyment is not a sharing in God’s joy. Perhaps the best example of this is schadenfreude, the pleasure in someone else’s misfortune, which is obviously perverse. But that is a topic for another day.)

I have said I want to talk about Christian joy. So what constitutes enjoyment as specifically Christian? It is this: receiving the joys of bodily, earthly life as gift and as invitation.  The apostle warns Timothy against those who abstain from marriage and certain foods, and reminds him that

everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.

When we see that, for instance, a good meal with friends is a gift from God and an invitation to participate in the eternal joys of the Trinitarian community, then that meal becomes for us a true joy for which we can be sincerely and wildly thankful. The same goes for a beautiful sunset or a stimulating conversation or an affection embrace. God says a resounding “Yes!” to our senses, to our carnality. (Remember, God has in Jesus taken up this very carnality!) When, however, such a meal (or such a conversation or embrace) happen apart from thankfulness, then they become temptations for us, because they invite us to value them as ultimate, rather than penultimate, goods.

To say that these carnal delights are penultimate is not to say that they are only means to an end. Of course, delighting in God and neighbor are the ultimate delights. But even carnal delights are ends as well as means. We have no reason to doubt Jesus when he promises to eat with us in the Kingdom. We have every reason to believe that the new creation will be more, infinitely more, enjoyable – sensually pleasurable – than this one.

In conclusion, then. The God we worship is a God of joy. And a God who loves. In love, this joyful God has invited us into His joys. More than that, this God has transformed our very existence so that it is brought up into His. This is the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection.

[B]ecause you will not abandon me to the grave,
nor will you let your Holy One see decay.

You have made known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

The resurrection of Jesus means the realization of the joyful presence of God in history, in time-and-space, in the human experience. The Holy Spirit, by whom the Father raised Jesus from the dead, now dwells in and among us as the presence of this joy so that we, as devotees of Jesus, live lives of enjoyment, delighting in God and in neighbor, thankful for all the sensual pleasures afforded to us by God’s unlimited affection for us.

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[1] Leonardo Boff, Holy Trinity: Perfect Community (Marynoll, NY: Orbis, 2000), 3-4. I wish Boff had said “This community is the deepest…”